The Cathedral
The Cathedral is a 67,000 seat open-air stadium located in the South Bronx, New York. Formerly home to the New York Yankees, it is now home to the Church of Bomberism. Pre-War History Formerly known as Yankee Stadium, The Cathedral was built in 1922 to serve as the home stadium for the New York Yankees, one of the city’s three baseball teams. The team formerly shared the Polo Grounds with the New York Giants, but decided to relocate due to friction between Jacob Ruppert and Horace Stoneham, owners of the Yankees and the Giants, respectively. Though many doubted that the Yankees would be able to thrive playing way out in The Bronx, the team thrived thanks to the impressive team that was fielded throughout the decade. Their most notable draw was Kid Ruth, a bombastic, larger-than-life figure who single-handedly changed how the game was played. Thanks to Ruth’s performance on the field, crowds upwards of the stadium’s 58,000 seat capacity regularly showed up, leading the public to dub Yankee Stadium “The House that Ruth Built”. The Yankees would go on to become the dominant force during the Golden Age of Baseball, measured from 1920 to 1960. During that era, the team won a whopping twenty-nine pennants and twenty World Series Championships, making them one of the most successful teams in professional sports worldwide. Thirteen of those victories’ were Subway Series’ – that is, series’ played between the Yankees and either the New York Giants or the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York’s other two baseball franchises. Numerous men that would eventually go on to be enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame played for or managed the Yankees from the 1920s to the 1960s, including Kid Ruth, Ludwig von Gehrig, Joe DiMagglio, “Triple-M” Mickey Mitchell Mantle, Francesco Risotto, Righty Gomez, “Whitey” Reynolds, Yogi Biryani, and AC Stengel. The sheer dominance that the team represented would end during the Silver Age of Baseball, measured from 1960 to 2000. Cost-cutting measures implemented by management, in addition to new amateur draft rules hurt the team’s ability to replenish and replace aging talent, resulting in a steep decline in performance. In 1965, the team lost more games than it won, posting their first losing record in forty years. For the most part, the Yankees were mired in mediocrity during this period, except for two periods: the mid-to-late 1970s and mid-to-late 1990s. In the mid-to-late 1970s, larger-than-life personalities such as Goldfish Hunter, Reggie Johnson, and “Wiley” Willy Martin helped lead the team back into prominence. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the “Core Four” of Rick Jeter, Mo Rivera, Andres Petite, and George Posada did the same. During the Nuclear Age of Baseball, measured from 2000 until 2077, the Yankees experienced a renaissance, experiencing a second era of dominance. Once again, they continually found themselves atop the standings and were regulars in the playoffs, though they only won a handful of World Series championships. In a stark contrast to the Golden Age roughly 100 years before, the Yankees regularly lost to their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom they beat six times between 1941 and 1956. Post-War History Like so many other things, the institution of baseball effectively ended when the Great War ended with nuclear holocaust. Located in the South Bronx, Yankee Stadium avoided direct hits by Chinese nuclear weaponry, but was located close enough to the various blast zones within the city to be heavily damaged. In addition to the blast damage was the radiation, which would make the area virtually uninhabitable for years. The first stirrings of life returning to the East Coast began around the turn of the 22nd century. Though a large, mostly intact concrete structure, the ruins of Yankee Stadium rarely were inhabited, and never were for prolonged periods when they were. The local wastelanders living in the area believed the ruins to be cursed. It wasn’t until 2167, when a local cult known as the Church of Bomberism took residence in the structure, that Yankee Stadium had its first permanent residents in almost 100 years. Renamed The Cathedral, the site became the center of their religion. By and large, the Bomberists removed themselves from the rest of the Post-War world. Instead of traveling around and evangelizing, adding to the ranks of their group, they choose to instead cloister themselves in their cathedral, praying to their gods to bring about a new world order to replace the hellish one they found themselves existing in. In 2063, a group operating in the Bronx known as The Machinists unleashed a large robot army from their headquarters, a former marina on Eastchester Bay. Normally uninvolved in politics, the monks of the Cathedral took up arms and did their part to destroy the robotic army. When the conflict ended and the Machinists’ army was defeated, the monks of the Cathedral helped broker an uneasy alliance between all of the powers in the Bronx. Known as The Cathedral Accords, the pact formally ended Libeteria’s longstanding conflict with Bob’s Wreckers and established a new political alliance with Hip-Hop Nation. Thanks to their part in the conflict and its clean up, the Church of Bomberism has experienced a massive growth. Men and women not only from across The Bronx, but from Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn as well have begun making pilgrimages to The Cathedral. Category:Places Category:Communities Category:New York